Thanksgiving 2010 - Big Cedar Lodge with the Crafts

Thanksgiving 2010 was a special time spent with our long time Tulsa friends where we stayed at Big Cedar Lodge in southern Missouri.  As we drove across Arkansas and into Missouri we came across this interesting old one lane bridge and had to stop and take a moment to capture it.  It was a cold brisk late afternoon as we came upon it, but it was so tranquil as we stared across the river hearing the breeze blow through the trees.  Even with Marti's little Sony pocket camera, it has outstanding tonal quality and a lovely memory with only a color correction in photoshop to warm it up a little bit.

This is typical of what we all come across in our vacation travels where it is not the right lighting conditions, we are without our best camera equipment and we have a nice little image worthy of capturing.  The sunlight above the mountain top is just difficult to deal with for this image, which results in blown out highlights no matter what you do.  If you meter on the scene without the sky and pull up to include the sky, you will be faced with even more blown out highlights than shown.  We had no filters to be able to calm down the bright sky, so this is the best we can do with the conditions we were dealt.  Composition is not what we would strive to accomplish, in honoring the rule of thirds having the upper 1/3 of the view finder filled with the sky, but this was the compensation we made to minimize the bright light effect.  If we had a tripod we could have taken 3 images with different exposures and then merged them together in photoshop for a great looking shot, but unfortunately we didn't have the proper equipment to handle the lighting conditions for this scene.

So what's the moral of the story, never leave home without an SLR digital camera and a tripod with a release cable.  With just this minimal amount of equipment you can take great images in just about any lighting circumstance.

Keep chasing the light.....but always be prepared!!